Secrets of Almaden

One of the world's most advanced science laboratories lies nestled in the coastal hills a few miles south of San Jose. An English lord would be hard pressed to inherit a finer estate for his countryseat. The road into the lab traverses grassy meadows, squeezes through a high-tech security gate, and neatly curls into the parking lot of a turquoise building at IBM Corp.'s Almaden Research Center, which sits alone in its corporate majesty on 690 acres of IBM-owned wildlife preserve.

In the lobby, exhibits present IBM's corporate self-truths in low-key patter -- the first disk drive, invented in the 1950s, weighed 500 pounds. As the age of vacuum tube transistors gave way to the age of microchips and, now, atomic scale devices, IBM scientists remained on the cutting edge ... blah, blah, blah.

Locked within the walls of the securely situated Almaden lab are, no doubt, industrial secrets potentially worth billions of dollars: new inventions and bright ideas worth guarding, possibly even with human lives.

There are also discoveries worth revealing to the public at large, in a controlled, image-conscious way that allows IBM to appear competitive in the computer hardware markets without, of course, giving away trade secrets.

In February, one such secret of the Almaden lab was unveiled. A paper written by three IBM physicists, Donald M. Eigler, Christopher P. Lutz, and Hari C. Manoharan, was published as the cover story in Nature, one of Western science's most prestigious publications. The paper explained the discovery of what the physicists call a quantum mirage. Simultaneous with publication of the Nature story, IBM's public relations division issued press releases heralding the quantum mirage as a new way to transport information using electron waves, rather than solid metal wires. In some ways, the quantum mirage sounds like a miracle of science fiction come true: teleportation.

While the quantum mirage promises to make multiple contributions to computer technology, Eigler, the lead scientist on the project, insists that it is not a form of teleportation, which is the instantaneous transportation of matter across space. That engineering feat has yet to be accomplished.

But the quantum mirage is, according to physicists with no connection to IBM, a technical tour de force, an elegant piece of work. In the world of physics and mathematics, "elegance" is often used to describe a relatively simple solution to a complex problem. Einstein's famous summation of the unity of mass and energy -- E=MC2 -- is the epitome of elegance. Not to equate the importance of Eigler's work with Einstein's earth-shaking theories, but Eigler's peers say that producing the quantum mirage was simply that. Elegant.

Surrounded by racks of machines lining his closely packed laboratory, Eigler takes obvious pleasure in tackling the difficult task of translating the physics behind the quantum mirage into a language comprehensible to a layperson. A sign over the lab door reads: "Just get the data -- a modern philosopher." A kind of modest American seat-of-the-pants-backyard-inventor pragmatism is being deliberately projected into this small room by one of the richest and most powerful multinational corporations to ever thread a screw.

The temptation to take the cues and to reproduce the images that IBM dangles before the source-dependent journalist is hard to resist. It is not shameful, after all, to be overawed by the mostly inaccessible technicalities of modern physics. The normal-brained reporter can choose to reprint, or rephrase, the well-written press release from IBM about the quantum mirage (which is exactly what dozens of newspapers did do).

And there is no harm in that, because the press release is true. On the other hand, visiting Eigler in his lab provides a more potent dose of reality than the surface spin of a press release.

The quest for the quantum mirage began with a Volkswagen-sized tool called a scanning tunneling microscope, which Eigler and his colleagues use regularly to visit -- and manipulate -- atomic scale terrains. When drawn by computers, these minute landscapes resemble preternaturally ancient deserts stripped of life. Under Eigler's electronic looking glass, cobalt atoms rise like mountains from seas of electrons, which slosh about in the shape of probability waves made sluggish -- and therefore visible -- by temperatures pushed to 4 degrees above absolute zero.

For more than a decade, Eigler and his custom-built microscope have been at the epicenter of nanotechnology, that is, the building of molecule-sized devices measured in billionths of a meter, or "nanometers." In 1989, Eigler and his collaborators learned how to use the tip of his microscope to pick up individual atoms and move them. Ultimately, they were able to arrange single atoms into shapes. (Not surprisingly, the first shape they made spelled out "IBM.") Closed geometric shapes, such as circles and ellipses, became known as quantum corrals. "Quantum" because the tiny energies in play can only be described with the mathematical language of quantum mechanics; "corrals" because the geometric structures have walls made up of individual atoms that trap electrons inside like a gas. The electron gas is the medium through which waves -- electron waves -- can travel.

To construct a corral, says Eigler, "We blast a copper surface with argon atoms, until it's superclean and superthin -- about 30 to 40 atoms thick. Then we supercool the smooth metal sheet inside a vacuum chamber and drop a dust of cobalt atoms on top of it." Eigler and his labmates then use the microscope tip to form the loose cobalt atoms into a quantum corral.

One particularly useful shape for a corral is an ellipse, or slightly elongated circle. Since the beginning of the 19th century, scientists have known that elliptically shaped materials possess a peculiar property. Equidistant from the center of an ellipse are two points -- two focuses, or foci. These foci share a remarkable link.

Imagine that an elliptically shaped pan is filled with water. Drop a pebble at one of the foci. Waves of water will ripple out from the splash and bounce off the walls of the dish, thereby creating a wave pattern that repeatedly doubles back on itself. Due to the nature of the ellipse, the pattern of intersecting waves will soon look as if there were two spots where the pebble dropped -- two foci. This phenomenon occurs because the shape of an ellipse perfectly focuses bouncing waves at two points; it reproduces the physical appearance of the first focal point at the second one.

Waves, of course, can move through many different substances, such as water, or through the air as sound. Modern physics considers an electron to be both a particle and a wave.

Inside an ellipse resonating with a pattern of rippling waves, the walls of the ellipse act as a lens, refocusing the center of the first ripple pattern at a second point. In effect, the ellipse makes a copy of the first focus at the second focus. But it is an attenuated copy, like the harmonic of a musical note.

Eigler wondered if the same effect would play out on an atomic level. What would happen, he asked, if he built an elliptical quantum corral out of cobalt atoms, and then placed a single cobalt atom at one of the foci? Since Eigler prides himself on "doing things that have never been done before," he did exactly that. And what he calls a "phantom copy" of the cobalt atom appeared at the second focus. This was the mirage.

Once the electron waves were set in motion by placing the cobalt atom at the primary focus, the electronic structure surrounding the cobalt atom was projected intact, but slightly weakened, to the opposite focus. A copy -- or harmonic -- of the cobalt atom appeared. Eigler calls it a "surprisingly faithful spectroscopic replica" of the original cobalt atom. It is not a hologram, however. Eigler comments that while there is some analogy to the physics that makes three-dimensional holograms, his two-dimensional mirages are different because, among other reasons, light waves are much, much larger than electron waves.

What Eigler and his colleagues produced is not really comparable to anything else in nature. Information about the cobalt atom placed at the first focus was transported -- or projected -- to the second focus, creating the mirage.

It turns out, though, that something more than just a mirage was projected.

A special magnetic energy scale called the Kondo effect, which was attached to the original cobalt atom, also made the trip to the second focus. This journey suggests some very interesting interpretive questions. Does the presence of the Kondo effect at the second focus indicate that a signal is being transmitted from one focus to the other focus? A signal that signifies the existence of the Kondo effect at the first focal point, that is. Or is the Kondo effect itself transported, sent to a remote spot as something more than a signal?

Eigler and his colleagues speculate that both of these interpretations might be right; and in the universe governed by quantum mechanics it is a quite unremarkable notion that two answers can be correct. But this leads to another provocative question: Is the projected Kondo effect a quasi-independent phenomenon? In other words, does the refocusing of the electronic shape of the original cobalt atom actually change the quantum reality at the second focus? Does the harmonic of the cobalt atom produce its own Kondo effect?

"The phantom aspect," says Eigler, "is that electrons at the second foci act as if there were a cobalt atom there. Since there is no cobalt atom there, we think of a 'phantom' atom as being there. However, there is nothing phantom about the electrons at the second foci. They are really doing their thing."

If not provide answers, Eigler says, further experiments should at least sharpen the questions.

Eigler's team was lauded by the scientific establishment when it unveiled the quantum mirage, not only because of the technical deftness the experiment demonstrated, but also because it showed how a well-known, "classical" phenomenon -- an ellipse focusing waves -- can be applied at the nanospace scale.

This discovery is not a purely scientific diversion, either. It has direct application to IBM's business. Computer research is driven by the electronic hardware market's greed for ever-smaller circuitry. The quantum mirage may be a giant step in a new direction of the minuscule. It turns out that an observer at the second focus point of the mirage can learn vital information about what is happening at the primary focus, such as whether or not there is an atom at the first point. This is an important piece of information because the existence of an atom at the first focus can represent a bit, a 1. The absence of an atom can represent another bit, a 0. Detecting the presence or absence of a bit is the foundation of computer technology, which is based on the infinite relationships of 0's and 1's.

Using the quantum mirage, the bit-encoded information is transported without conventional wires, which typically conduct information-bearing energies at the expense of losing some energy as, for instance, heat. The quantum mirage, on the other hand, transmits information inside the quantum corral without using any energy.

Eigler discusses other applications, such as using the quantum mirage to probe the characteristics of atoms and molecules remotely, while minimizing the disturbing electronic effects of a probe upon its small subjects. It seems obvious that the quantum mirage will be a useful tool in inventing the new field of nanomechanics, possibly helping to solve problems in sparking a revolution based on quantum computers.

And then there is the nagging question about teleportation. How much information needs to be transported before the copy becomes more than a mirage? Until the replica becomes a thing itself? Until an atom can be considered to have been teleported?

One prominent physicist sees a "sketchy" connection between the quantum mirage and ongoing attempts to teleport certain aspects of atoms ("quantum states") and, even, whole atoms. Eigler says emphatically, however, that the quantum mirage is not a teleportation event.

By way of further explanation, Eigler holds up a pink pencil eraser. The quality of pinkness that is transmitted to the observer's eyeball, he says, is analogous to a quality of the cobalt atom copied at the second focus of the quantum mirage. Ever the model empiricist, Eigler suddenly stops talking. It is clear that the philosophical questions posed by the existence of the quantum mirage may not be solved as simply -- and elegantly -- as the more concrete equations imbedded in the data.